Some Fitness Shenanigans

I just read this post by Wil Wheaton, and in reading it something clicked in my brain, and so now I am here writing about it*.

Despite it being true that I don’t much mind the fifteen pounds I could stand to lose, I’d actually like to lose them.

I have a FitBit and love it, but I don’t manage to use it very effectively as a motivator (mostly because I’m usually most motivated to sit on my ass and read stuff or make stuff or write stuff or edit stuff). Often, my FitBit simply serves to tell me how little I move around.

The thing that clicked in my brain while reading Wil’s post is that I am not connected with the right people through Fitbit or LoseIt (LoseIt is an app that easily lets you track what you eat). My dad, my cousin, and my friend who’s a marathon runner are not the right people to “compete” with for steps and diet. And neither are random strangers.

The people I’d like to connect with for some shared upping of the movement and good-food-choices game are people who, like me, work from home. We who work from home don’t have a commute and we don’t walk up and down hallways and flights of stairs all day. We who work from home need to go out of our way to be even a tiny bit active, and that’s a different sort of challenge than people have when they commute and need to motivate themselves to stop at the gym on their way home from work. The last time I recall losing weight, it was around seven years ago when I went on a seventeen-day book tour and schlepped my ass and my luggage all over the damn place. Pounds, they shed right off me.

I fucking hate the gym. I have approximately zero interest in fad diets. If there’s a book about it, I discount it by default. All I want to do is get better at making activity and wiser food choices a normal part of my day. That’s it. I’m not a foodie and I eat for convenience, and I’d like to eat better convenient food. I want to be held accountable in some way that doesn’t activate my adolescent attitude problem.

So here’s what I propose:

If you work from home and you are, like me, generally speaking, more interested in exercising your brain and your hands than the rest of yourself, let’s connect on Fitbit and/or LoseIt, and subtly encourage each other to take an hour every day and get out of the damn house. Let’s be brutally honest with each other about the crap foods we eat so that we might also subtly encourage each other to make wiser food choices.

That’s it. If you fall into this category of people who work from home and hate the gym and want to get moving and eat better, and you want to do this thing, shoot me an email and we can swap usernames and whatnot.

* I will not make a habit of blogging about healthier eating and exercise. Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.